


Horizons Sing

by FanchonMoreau



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-03
Updated: 2019-01-03
Packaged: 2019-10-03 08:17:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17280416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FanchonMoreau/pseuds/FanchonMoreau
Summary: Oh, my dear Doctor. I was never on your side at all.After Mondas, Missy makes the Doctor listen to the music of the universe, as she hears it.





	Horizons Sing

**Author's Note:**

> Rated for language and dubiously consensual telepathy (ie the Master's MO).

 

The Doctor is wrong about a lot of things.

Missy recounts all the ways he’s wrong to the tune of a High Gallifreyan nursery rhyme she’d learned as a child. He’s wrong about her being dead, if he’s assumed she’d died on Mondas. He’s wrong about her refusing to stand with him, _and_ he’s wrong about her agreeing to stand with him: her two incarnations had all but cancelled each other out.

Equal and opposite forces, that’s part of the rhyme too. She traces the Gallifreyan symbols on the surface she’s lying on and sings the melody in a perfectly unbroken breath.

The sun above her reaches the local celestial meridian-- high noon, some unevolved creatures would call it. She blinks, and the world around her starts to sharpen. She rolls her head to the side.

IN THESE STONES HORIZONS SING.

For fuck’s sake. She’s in _Cardiff._ She’s lying on a bench in Cardiff.

It’s the most powerful rift in the space-time continuum, even though it may well be one of the dullest places in the universe. She checks her pulses. If she wants to survive her injuries from Mondas without regenerating, she’ll need to be here for forty-eight hours at least.

Of course. Because after distracting her former self long enough to change the settings on the the laser screwdriver and curtail her own suicide (was she really that thick-headed back then?) and procuring a vortex manipulator before the whole forest blew up (she’s pretty sure she knows who to thank for _that_ ), her final challenge is not boring herself to death in bloody Cardiff.

“Happy now?” she mutters to a Doctor who’s not there.

She sonics a perception field around her with her umbrella and dozes. She works out a plan to telepathically control the whole earth just by changing a few WiFi passwords, but it’s so _boring_ that it puts her back to sleep. She pilfers cigarettes from strangers and spends hours blowing out perfectly proportioned streams of smoke and watching them dissolve into air.

“You tryin’ to make shapes?” someone asks from beside her. A female voice, from one of this planet’s norths. High-pitched and gratingly perky. “Do you take requests?”

Missy rolls her eyes and blows out a shapeless cloud. “I take requests on how you would like to be murdered. I offer stabbing, shooting, being set on fire, being dropped from a tall building, rabid dogs, of course, very popular option, and if you’d really like to be torn apart by a large mob, it can definitely be arranged.”

Then it occurs to her that she never put down her perception field. And she doesn’t mess around with her perception fields; there’s only one person in the universe who could get through.

Missy sits ups, swings her legs around so she’s facing the Millennium Centre. The Doctor’s looking out in the other direction, over the bay. Missy takes a long look at her profile. The outfit is as offensive as ever, but the blonde works for her, as do the imperfect arcs of her jawline and cheekbones. She has the same warmth to her eyes that Theta did at the academy.

Their bodies tend to like each other, no matter the regeneration. But her body likes this body of the Doctor’s quite a bit.

“Fixed yourself up nice this time round, Doctor,” she comments blithely. She tosses the cigarette away. “Mind you, it looks like you got dressed in a junkyard, in the dark, but I do like the bling.”

She reaches out to touch the stars at the top of the Doctor’s ear. The Doctor flinches, but lets her. The metal rings softly when the edges of the stars clink together. Cheap Gallifreyan silver.

“You were going to stand with me,” the Doctor says quietly. “On Mondas.”

“When were we on Mondas?” Missy asks, furrowing her brow and pretending to be properly confused. She may be able to convince the Doctor that she’s an earlier version of herself.

The Doctor’s not having it. She turns to Missy, smiling slightly as their eyes lock. Her gaze is nothing but friendly and inquisitive. If there’s any sadness or regret at all, this face is good at hiding it.

Missy laughs, makes the sound as low and dark as she can. “Oh, my dear Doctor. I was never on your side at all.”

The Doctor smiles wider. “Prove it.”

She’s taunting now. Fine, if that’s the way she wants it to go, well. Missy can oblige.

“Happily,” Missy says. She takes care to box away what really happened on Mondas in her mind, and then she places the Doctor’s hands on her temples. The Doctor’s eyes widen in surprise.

“Ready to hear the music, Doctor?” 

She doesn’t let the Doctor respond; she just plunges them both deep into her mind.

Missy seeks out her darkest places. Centuries and centuries of a drumbeat that wouldn’t let her rest. Hunger than could never be sated. Years spent in burnt-out or half-formed or human bodies. The time war, being trapped facing the Supreme Dalek on the slopes of the Never Vault for three thousand years. Long, timeless stretches in prisons and asylums. And seventy lonely years quantum-locked in a vault by someone she thought was her friend.

_You understand the universe, you see it, you grasp it, but you never learned to hear the music._

The Doctor’s voice in her head is gentle but still guarded: _That’s not what I meant. I think you know that._

Missy gnashes her teeth, and then she unleashes chaos straight into the Doctor’s mind. Planets aligning in harmony and then careening from their orbits. A black hole turning everything around it into a dark, despairing howl. The heat death of a star-- hydrogen to helium to carbon, the heat death of the whole universe, the entropy of all things. The perfectly calibrated symphony of the universe collapsing into static and screaming and banging and death rattling and moaning and weeping and silence.

She lets the Doctor go.

The Doctor holds her gaze for just a moment. And then she _beams_.

“Koschei,” she whispers, and then she kisses Missy lingeringly on the mouth. Missy blocks any attempt at another telepathic connection, but the physical one startles her. She feels her eyes close. She leans into it.

What _did_ the Doctor see?

The Doctor breaks the kiss, and she bounds off the bench like an excitable child.

“Koschei, I’m going to set you free,” she says, the words almost bursting out of her. “I’m going to let you go and contend with the universe. It’s time. It’s really, _really_ time. And I can’t say what you’ll do, and that’s okay, I can’t say what _I’ll_ do either. Order to chaos, that’s how it goes. Beautiful, wild, irresistible chaos. It’s insane, you have to be absolutely mad to try to live in it. I know I am. We all are, really. Totally, bonkers insane. You’re not alone.”

Missy considers the Doctor for a moment, and then she flops back down on the bench. The Doctor’s wrong again, she thinks. She stands there, and she talks nonsense, and she even has the gall to _kiss_ her, and still, she doesn’t understand. And Missy’s alone. Staring into a darkness that Theta was always too bright to see.

Perhaps they should be enemies, and nothing more.

Missy makes a disgruntled, disgusted noise. “Are you _done?_ ” she spits out in her thickest Scottish brogue.

The Doctor grins, and then nods. “Yup,” she says, popping the ‘p’ delightedly. “And if you try anything, which I don’t think you will but even if you do, I’ve got my fam. And whatever it is, we’ll stop it.”

Missy clicks her tongue a few times. “Cocky and stupid,” she drawls. She swings herself up so she’s sitting again and flutters her eyelashes at the Doctor. “At least you’re pretty.”

The Doctor pretends she doesn’t notice. She runs back to Missy, busses a quick kiss to her cheek, and then runs off.

And then, just as quickly, runs back again. “So you got off Mondas, but how? I burnt up the forest.”

Missy chuckles. “Darling, have you learned nothing about me at all?”

The Doctor snaps, and then points at her. “Vortex manipulator. But Nardole would have caught that if you’d taken it off the TARDIS… _unless_ you got it from somewhere else. And not your previous self because he had his own TARDIS.”

Missy frowns. She had assumed the vortex manipulator she found had been left by her previous self, perhaps as an unconscious failsafe. But ultimately it doesn’t really matter. She has it now. “Do spin yourself in more circles, love,” she says. “I could do with the amusement.”

The Doctor paces, and then suddenly her eyes light up. “It’s ME!” she shouts. “I know you have it, and I go back and I give it to you. I’ve got a spare I think in the TARDIS library, or maybe in my exact replica of La Scala? Got that there to remind me, have to take Graham to hear Maria Callas. Later. All of that later. Mondas first. You _first_.”

The Doctor rushes to her, and then nearly crashes to her knees before her. “You’re not nearly as destructive as you think you are,” she says. “And I think you’re going to find that out very soon. But until then,” and here she raises Missy’s knuckles to her lips and kisses them, “I’ll be out there, waiting for you.”

And with that, she starts to run.

Missy watches as the Doctor disappears from view. “If you say so, Theta,” she says to no one.

She collapses back down on the bench. She feels the rip in time and space pulse beneath her, and she gathers as much strength from it as she can.

Theoretically, spacetime is impenetrable and indestructible. But here she is, in the place that proves that wrong. Cardiff, Wales. She’d laugh if it weren’t so pitiful.

She closes her eyes. In time, the silence and the darkness come to claim her.

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from the inscription on the Millennium Centre, as translated from Welsh: in these stones horizons sing. Also, bring back Cardiff as a rip in spacetime from the RTD era, thanks.


End file.
